Piper Alpha disaster: how 167 oil rig workers died | Business | The Guardian Oil and gas companies Piper Alpha disaster: how 167 oil rig workers died Report into the 1988 disaster made over 100 recommendations about how safety should be improved in North Sea 167 out of 228 workers either on the rig or one of the safety vessels patrolling it died during the Piper Alpha disaster. Photograph: I.T.N./Rex Features Oil and gas companies Piper Alpha disaster: how 167 oil rig workers died Report into the 1988 disaster made over 100 recommendations about how safety should be improved in North Sea Close This article is 3 years old The Piper Alpha disaster which killed 167 workers on 6 July 1988 off the coast of Aberdeen is the world'sdeadliest ever oil rig accident. The controversy around it was heightened when a report into the disaster by Lord Cullen judged that the operator Occidental Petroleum had used inadequate maintenance and safety procedures. He made more than 100 recommendations about how safety should be improved in the North Sea.

Along with other oil companies, Occidental had massively scaled back spending as the price of oil had plunged from more than $30 per barrel to $8 in the 1980s compared to today's level of more than $100. Piper Alpha was once Britain's biggest single oil and gas producing platform, bringing more than 300,000 barrels of crude a day – 10% of the country's total – from below the seabed 125 miles north-east of Aberdeen. It was owned by a consortium of foreign companies including Texaco and operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental, which sold off its UK interests soon after the disaster to concentrate on the US and Middle East. Oil was discovered at the Piper field in 1973 and was brought on stream three years later. By 1980 the steel platform was modified to also take gas and was connected by pipeline to the Orkney Islands. The original modules on the structure were carefully located, with the staff quarters kept well away from the most dangerous production parts of the platform. But this safety feature was diluted when the gas compression units were installed next to the central control room.

Further dangers arose when Occidental decided to keep the platform producing oil and gas as it set about a series of construction, maintenance and upgrade works. A lack of communication at a shift change meant staff were not aware that they should not use a key piece of pipework which had been sealed with a temporary cover and no safety valve. Gas leaked out and ignited while firewalls that would have resisted fire on an oil platform failed to cope with the ensuing gas explosion. When the platform blew 167 out of 228 workers either on the rig or one of the safety standby vessels patrolling it died. The platform was completely destroyed and it took almost three weeks for the fire to be brought under control by famed American wild well controller, Red Adair. The accident cost the Lloyd's insurance marketmore than £1bn, making it the largest insured man-made catastrophe. Occidental paid out $100m (£66m) to families of the deceased but escaped any kind of criminal or civil sanction. No one was made personally liable in the courts either.

NEWS | The Piper Alpha Disaster: 25 Years On | Rigzone The Piper Alpha Disaster: 25 Years On by Jon Mainwaring Tweet This Saturday a commemoration service will be held in Aberdeen, Scotland to mark the 25th anniversary of the world's worst offshore oil and gas disaster. On July 6th 1988, 167 oil workers were killed, while there were just 62 survivors, after a gas condensate leak led to an explosion and fire on the North Sea platform Piper Alpha, which was completely destroyed. The service, which will be held at Aberdeen's Hazlehead Gardens at 11 a.m. (UK time), will be another reminder of the risks taken by oil and gas workers in the North Sea and in other offshore locations around the world. An inquiry, led by Lord Cullen, into the Piper Alpha disaster concluded that the initial gas condensate leak had been the result of maintenance work being carried out simultaneously on a pump and a connected safety valve. When the pipe work from which the safety valve had been removed was pressurized at start-up, it is thought the leak occurred.

The inquiry was highly critical of Piper Alpha's operator, Occidental Petroleum, which was found guilty of having inadequate maintenance and safety procedures. Rigzone asked trade body Oil & Gas UK what the industry today has learned from the Piper Alpha disaster. Robert Paterson, Health, Safety and Employment Issues Director at the organization, squarely puts the disaster down to "an under-resourced regulator that lacked competence and numbers. It was a prescriptive regime and increasingly stifled best practice." "[The Cullen Inquiry] recommended that a specialist part of the Health and Safety Executive oversee health and safety offshore and that it had suitable resources to do that. It required a highly competent and well-resourced regulator. The existing regulatory framework was replaced with a good quality framework, driving towards continuous improvement," Paterson said, adding that operators also now have to put a safety case forward that has to be accepted by the regulator before they can go ahead with their activities. Perhaps the most important legacy of the Cullen Inquiry was the resulting report that led to 106 health and safety recommendations, all of which were accepted by the industry.

Indeed, the industry acted immediately to carry out the 48 recommendations that operators were directly responsible for, while the UK Health and Safety Executive oversaw the 57 recommendations that fell into its remit. Fleming. | Library - Piper Alpha: The deadliest oil rig disaster Piper Alpha: The deadliest oil rig disaster by Fleming. Team Piper Alpha was once Britain's biggest single oil and gas producing platform. It produced more than 300,000 barrels of crude a day (about ten percent of the country's total crude production). Everything changed in 1988. The Piper Alpha disaster killed 167 out of 228 workers and remains the deadliest offshore oil rig disaster of all time. The youngest man to die was only 19. Yet it had one good outcome. A report from the Cullen inquiry made over 100 recommendations about how safety should be improved in the North Sea. What happened? It is hard to tell since only 61 people survived, the platform was completely destroyed and it took almost three weeks for the fire to be brought under control by famous American well controller, Red Adair.

Red used to say: “If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” The report showed that there had indeed been some amateurism present. The accident occurred due to a gas leakage from pipes, because the pressure safety valve had been removed as a part of routine maintenance. It was only temporarily sealed afterward and the pump was not supposed to be switched on; however, because of communication errors, the crew did turn it on and the leak resulted in gas ignition and serial explosions. The platform’s design did not include blast walls, so workers were not protected – personnel who had the authority to order an evacuation had already been killed when the first explosion destroyed the control room. By the time civil and military rescue helicopters reached the rig, the flames were over 100 metres high, the fire reached temperatures of 580–700 degrees Celsius and the smoke together with debris thrown 800 metres into the air made the evacuation impossible. Most of those who died were the ones following the protocol and waiting for helicopters in the galley or in the canteen; unfortunately, the helicopters were prevented from landing by flames and smoke.

The accident cost the insurance market more than £1bn, making it the largest insured man-made catastrophe ever. The operator, Occidental Petroleum, paid out £66m to the families of the deceased but escaped any kind of criminal or civil sanction. No one was made personally liable in the courts either. Almost 30 years on, this event remains branded into Scotland's memory. Do you want to find out more about the causes of tragedies like this and about the best practices in fire protection as well as hydrocarbon safety, control and emergency procedures? During one of the sessions at our NEBOSH Certificate in Oil and Gas Operational Safety event, we will learn from past accidents, and Piper Alpha is among them.

Africa Oil & Gas 'You could only call the scene apocalyptic': The Piper Alpha disaster 25 years on | The Independent Home News 'You could only call the scene apocalyptic': The Piper Alpha disaster 25 years on On the 25th anniversary of the oil rig explosion, a witness talks publicly about the fire for the first time Saturday 6 July 2013 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online The Piper Alpha oil rig disaster PA Paul Berriff remembers the events of 25 years ago as though they were yesterday: the smell of burning oil; the sea burning orange and on fire; the bodies in the water. It was, he says, "apocalyptic". "I've experienced all sorts of tragedies – I'm a survivor of 9/11, I know what it's like not only to witness trauma but to be a casualty myself. But there's nothing, nothing like Piper Alpha," the TV cameraman, who sustained injuries filming near the twin towers, said. This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the worst offshore disaster of all time.

On 6 July 1988 an explosion ripped through the North Sea oil rig Piper Alpha, and the resulting oil and gas fires which destroyed the platform, also took the lives of 167 of the 228 men working that day. Yesterday, a remembrance service took place in Aberdeen's Hazelhead Park, which included a fly-past from an RAF Sea King helicopter and a roll call of those who perished in the inferno. For Mr Berriff, an ITV cameraman working at the time on a documentary about the RAF, the events are etched in his memory. Not just because of the horror that he witnessed first-hand on that night or because it happened to be his 42nd birthday, but because he had captured everything on camera. Based at RAF Lossiemouth in north-east Scotland, Mr Berriff was having dinner with his film crew at a restaurant in a nearby town to celebrate his birthday, when his pager beeped. "I had just finished my prawn cocktail, so I went to the phone and rang the base and they told me they had a call to a fire on an oil platform, 120 miles out in the North Sea," he said.

Heading back to the airbase with his colleague, a sound recordist, they boarded the awaiting rescue helicopter. "When I got on board, I asked the pilot if he had a better idea about what it was, but all he knew was that it was a fire on a rig. No one had any idea how serious it was." The RAF had sent out a reconnaissance communication aircraft called a Nimrod, to assess the scene from roughly 12,000ft, to relay information to the rescue crews who were on their way. But it was only within minutes of leaving the base that Mr Berriff knew the situation was unlike anything he or anyone else could have imagined. "As we were flying out over the Moray Firth, the Nimrod came on the radio and said, 'We're just coasting out over the Moray Firth and we can see the fire.' We couldn't believe what we'd just heard: we'd barely left the coast and the oil rig was still 120 miles away.

"After only 20 minutes we could see the horizon was glowing orange, and as we neared we could see the flames shooting up 350ft into the sky." Within 10 minutes of the explosion taking place – it was caused by a high-pressure gas leak which ignited and sent a fireball ripping through the platform – the decision was taken to evacuate the rig. The helicopter Mr Berriff was travelling in should have hovered over the rig in order to begin saving lives, but the heat from the inferno was so great that the helicopter was unable to get anywhere near. "I could feel the heat radiating through the fuselage on the helicopter – and we were still a mile away." Instead they were called to a standby boat a quarter of a mile from Piper Alpha, to which about 20 survivors had managed to swim to safety through the burning seas. "We were asked to winch up some of those survivors. These chaps were very badly burnt. I put my camera down and helped the crew to look after the guys.

One guy basically had half his face melted off – it was horrific." Less than a mile away, a specially designed fire-fighting platform called Tharos, with a 100-bed hospital, began pumping water on to Piper Alpha. But the water just evaporated with the heat, and so it could only be used as a hospital. "The whole scene around you is on fire, these guys were jumping 150-200ft from the top of the blazing platform into a raging cauldron of burning seas, the roaring sound could be heard for miles around like a big blowlamp. The rig continued to groan and there were frequent explosions – one could only describe the scene as apocalyptic." By 3am Mr Berriff and his crew got the news that there had been about 220 men on board but that only 50 or 60 had managed to get off. Once Mr Berriff had returned to base he began to look through his footage, which was played on news bulletins the following day. "Once we got it on the editing machines and started watching the footage, no one spoke," he said.

The Cullen inquiry was set up in the aftermath of the disaster to establish what had gone so terribly wrong. It concluded the initial leak was the result of maintenance work being carried out simultaneously on a pump and a safety valve. It was critical of the rig's operator, Occidental, which was found guilty of having poor safety procedures and inadequate maintenance, though no criminal charges were ever brought. This weekend, in a letter to the industry body Oil and Gas UK to mark the anniversary, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, wrote: "Conditions in the North Sea are some of the harshest anywhere in the world … We will never forget the 167 who lost their lives on 6 July 1988.

My thoughts as Aberdeen remembers its loss are with their families and loved ones, the survivors and all those involved on that tragic night." More about: Piper Alpha survivors recall disaster 25 years on | Business | The Guardian Oil and gas companies Piper Alpha survivors recall disaster 25 years on Charles Haffey remembers the terror on board the North Sea oil rig when it exploded on the night of 6 July 1988 Charles Haffey saw the shattered remains of the platform being sunk into the sea in a muted ceremony to clear the site. Photograph: PA Oil and gas companies Piper Alpha survivors recall disaster 25 years on Charles Haffey remembers the terror on board the North Sea oil rig when it exploded on the night of 6 July 1988 Thursday 4 July 2013 19.01 EDT First published on Thursday 4 July 2013 19.01 EDT Share on Messenger Close Even 25 years on, Charles Haffey's most powerful memory of the Piper Alpha disaster was the overwhelming, deafening noise. The vast inferno created by simultaneous eruptions from ruptured gas and crude oil pipelines sounded like thousands of blow torches alight at full pressure.

That intense, inescapable roar was accompanied by other sounds, as the extraordinary heat melted steel, fracturing Piper Alpha's vast structure, as glass windows exploded and as its offices, canteens and sleeping quarters disintegrated. There were three then four vast explosions, each seeming more devastating than the last, spread out over several hours. "At the time we felt detached from what was going on because I suppose psychologically your brain can't process what's going on. It was surreal. Your mind can't take it in," Haffey said, in an interview with the Guardian. "If you take the actual rig itself, the best way you can describe the rig is if you can imagine a welder's blow torch and magnify it thousands of times. The brain switches off; your brain can't accept what's happening. At the back of your mind you're aware that the next step you take could be your last. You have no sense of time." He remembers the heat: on one effort to find survivors who had jumped into the sea – dozens of men jumped, some from 180 feet or more - they had sailed under Piper Alpha, some 20 to 30 feet from the burning platform.

They were saved from being boiled by the overwhelming heat by water being hosed over their heads from the Tharos, Piper Alpha's semi-submersible fire-fighting and accommodation vessel. "I remember going through this thin mist: somebody on the Tharos had turned the water on to keep us cool," he said. "We managed to get through it and picked these guys up." Haffey, now a civil servant living in Fife, was on board Piper Alpha's rescue vessel, the Silver Pit, when the rig exploded on the night of 6 July 1988. As one of the men most heavily involved in the rescue effort. He had both a grandstand seat and a hands' on role in the disaster. He recalled hearing the staccato detonations of explosions, the sounds of men screaming, of retrieving burnt survivors and bodies, and once watching one man drown. Two fellow crew men on the Silver Pit were killed too, on a Zodiac fast rescue boat.

He had had previous experience of violence at sea: Haffey had served in the Falklands war in 1982, as a sonar operator on board HMS Yarmouth , a Type 12 frigate which was heavily involved in the fighting before and after the Royal Marines landed in San Carlos Water. In his interview for a new documentary on the disaster, Fire in the Night, based on a book of the same name by the journalist Stephen McGinty, Haffey said: "If you're working in a factory, your alarm bell goes, you go into the car park, you are safe, yeah? You get your name ticked off, the fire brigade arrives, yeah? That doesn't happen at sea, particularly not on a ship, particularly not on an oil rig, yeah? "That fire alarm goes off, if you can't fight that fire, if something happens to you rig, or happens to that ship and you end up in the water, that's when your survival starts.

That's the beginning of your problems, it's not the end of your problems, it's the beginning of your problems." Remarkably, two weeks after Piper Alpha, Haffey was back at sea after resuming his role on board the Silver Pit. It was back on site as a guard vessel. He saw the shattered remains of the platform being sunk into the sea in a muted ceremony to clear the site. He recalled on Fire in the Night his conflicted feelings. "It kind of reminded me of a squat, ugly crab, you know? [And] you hated this thing, you hated this thing, because it caused so much misery. You didn't want it to be there – you wanted it wiped from the face of the Earth. And yet I was also there when they brought the Piper Alpha down, when they demolished it. "[Then] I remember thinking 'But there's nothing there any more'. I hated it for being there but when they demolished it, you hated it for not being there, because there was nothing there that said something terrible, something … a great tragedy's happened here." For many, many other men who survived Piper Alpha, the psychological trauma was intense and far-reaching.

A study published in the British Journal of Psychology by three experts in disasters then based at the Centre for Trauma Research at Royal Cornhill hospital in Aberdeen, Alastair Hull, David Alexander and Susan Klein in 2002 found that significant rates of survivor guilt, anger, acute post traumatic stress and physical injury. Nearly every survivor experienced psychological trauma. They interviewed 36 survivors: a third of those experienced survivor guilt 10 years after the disaster, and 70% acute guilt. Another 61% had "performance guilt", blaming themselves for their decisions on the night. Nearly every man there lost a friend and 86% saw someone killed or severely injured. Hull, now with NHS Tayside, said there was one other significant but so far unreported finding as the disaster worsened: very high levels of "collegiate behaviour", or selfless cooperation and comradeliness with men they barely knew. "We found a huge number of very collegiate descriptions: of men deciding to help others who they didn't necessarily know terribly well, and coming together almost as teams to help each other survive. Quite startling examples," Hull told the Guardian. "A very high percentage of people thought that they were going to die," he said.

"Some of the men had very prolonged escapes." Unlike many disasters which occur suddenly and quickly, the Piper Alpha disaster was drawn out: it was several hours before the final devastating explosions. Yet the trapped men repeatedly showed altruism was not restricted to friends or workmates. "It was one man's first ever shift on Piper Alpha," Hull said. "It was very very clear they helped whoever was there." Haffey said his response to the disaster at the time was not to dwell on it – he felt "there was no point for me either regretting it or not regretting it". But he confirms there were some mental scars: anger was one significant after effect. But he no longer feels any anger. "I'm fed up feeling angry, because no matter how angry you are, you're not going to change anything that night. I was angry, I would say, for about the first ten years but somehow you just have to reason with yourself: no matter how angry you get about this you're not going to bring those guys back." Explosion in the North Sea (Piper Alpha Disaster) - YouTube Explosion in the North Sea (Piper Alpha Disaster) Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video?

Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Jan 9, 2015 Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. The platform began production in 1976, first as an oil platform and then later converted to gas production. An explosion and the resulting oil and gas fires destroyed it on 6 July 1988, killing 167 men, with only 61 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster, the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact.

A large fixed platform, Piper Alpha was situated on the Piper oilfield, approximately 120 miles (193 km) northeast of Aberdeen in 474 feet (144 m) of water, and comprised four modules separated by firewalls.[7] The platform was constructed by McDermott Engineering at Ardersier and UIE at Cherbourg, with the sections united at Ardersier before tow out during 1975, with production commencing in late 1976. For safety reasons the modules were organised so that the most dangerous operations were distant from the personnel areas. The conversion from oil to gas broke this safety concept, with the result that sensitive areas were brought together, for example, the gas compression next to the control room, which played a role in the accident. It produced crude oil and natural gas from 24 wells for delivery to the Flotta oil terminal on Orkney and to other installations by three separate pipelines. At the time of the disaster, Piper was one of the heaviest platforms (along with Magnus and Brae B) operating in the North Sea.

Category Piper Alpha disaster: 25 years on, safety still priority Piper Alpha disaster: 25 years on, safety still priority July 5, 2013 by Jessica Berthereau Fire-fighters extinguish a simulated gas leak during an exercise in Liverpool, England on September 7, 2010. A recent report from the industry body, Oil & Gas UK, found oil and gas leaks fell by 48 percent in three years between 2010 and 2013, just short of the 50 percent target. Safety has vastly improved on North Sea oil and gas platforms since the deadly explosion on the Piper Alpha rig 25 years ago, but experts warn there is no room for complacency. The energy industry 's deadliest ever accident, on July 6, 1988, claimed the lives of 167 men when a gas leak caused a fire and then the collapse of the rig off the coast of Aberdeen in Scotland.

A recent report from the industry body, Oil & Gas UK, found oil and gas leaks fell by 48 percent in three years between 2010 and 2013, just short of the 50 percent target. "While several major incidents have had to be addressed in the period covered by this report, non-fatal, over-three day, and combined fatal and major injury rates have all been in steady decline," said Robert Paterson, health and safety director at Oil & Gas UK. But Jake Molloy, offshore organiser of the RMT union, which represents about a quarter of the 28,500 staff working on North Sea platforms, warned safety remains an issue. "The fact that we had 47 major or significant gas leaks over the course of the last year, as well as a number of major injuries, demonstrates that there is always room for improvement," he told AFP. Patterson accepts "there is no room for complacency".

"While the review that followed the Piper Alpha disaster provided the foundation for what is now one of the most robust offshore health and safety regimes in the world, the approaching 25th anniversary of that tragedy only serves to remind us that we must never stop at striving to make things safer," he said. Only 61 workers survived the fire on the Piper Alpha rig, which produced the equivalent of 300,000 barrels of oil a day, and many of them were badly burned. Lord Cullen, the judge who led the investigation into the tragedy, found the accident was not simply the result of technical or human failures. "As is often the case, such failures are indicators of underlying weaknesses in the management of safety," he told an anniversary conference in Aberdeen last month. His investigation made 106 recommendations, all of which were adopted by the industry. But he warned: "No regulations can make up for deficiencies in the way safety is actually managed. "As I said in my report, it is essential to create a corporate atmosphere or culture in which safety is understood to be and is accepted as number one priority." Molloy said many of his union's members still do not feel comfortable raising safety concerns with management.

"There is still a degree of fear amongst workers about challenging and about reporting, for fear that they could suffer as a consequence of doing so," he said. He pointed to the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, when a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the worst oil spill in US history and killed 11 people. In the opening of a trial in February to determine how much BP and its subcontractors should pay in damages, lawyers for the US government said they had proof that a "culture of disregard to safety" led to the blowout. "It was one of the most technically advanced pieces of equipment on the planet," Molloy said.

"And despite that the workers died primarily because they weren't able or willing to challenge what was going on on that installation in the preceding weeks." The day the sea caught fire: 20 years after the Piper Alpha explosion, the survivors are finally able to tell their story | Daily Mail Online The day the sea caught fire: 20 years after the Piper Alpha explosion, the survivors are finally able to tell their story Updated: 03:45 EST, 17 July 2008 The Piper Alpha explosion was the world's worst off-shore oil disaster. Only now, 20 years on, are the traumatised survivors finally able to tell the full horrifying story... The fire was visible 70 miles away as a distant, flickering flame on the horizon. The heat generated was so intense that a helicopter could only circle at a perimeter of one mile, the tongues of flame extending hundreds of feet above the rotor blades. On the sea surface, a converted fishing trawler inched as close as possible. But the paint on the vessel's hull blistered and the rope handrails began to smoke. In the water, men's heads could be seen bobbing like apples as their scalps roasted in the heat.

Enlarge Tragic: The blazing Piper Alpha oil rig on July 6, 1988 Still just about standing at the centre of the inferno was the Piper Alpha oil platform. It had exploded in a massive ball of flames with 226 men on board as a result of a gas leak. Only 59 of them would survive. Within two hours of the initial explosion on that fateful night 20 years ago, the rig had collapsed from its position 300ft above the surface of the sea and become a flaming pyre of twisted metal. This is the story of the worst off-shore oil disaster the world has ever seen, told as never before, by those who survived it. By 1988, the oil platform that had once been the world's single largest oil producer, was starting to show its age. The time when it produced 317,000 barrels of oil a day was long gone. The price of oil had slumped and oil companies were slashing their budgets. In a hint of growing frailty, Piper Alpha had suffered a small explosion in 1984, triggered by a gas escape, and dozens of men had been evacuated by helicopter.

But there was far worse to come - and on that July afternoon ten years ago, the danger lay unseen for hours before disaster struck. It was down to one small safety valve, one of more than 100 identical devices that were essential to prevent a dangerous build-up of liquid gas in an area of the oil rig known as C module. A survivor of the North Sea oil platform disaster shows his burnt hands to Dr Armand Hammer, 90-year-old chairman of Los Angles-based Occidental Petroleum, in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary As part of routine maintenance and safety procedure, technicians had removed, checked and replaced all these valves - all except for this one, which had been taken off earlier that day and checked, but never put back. At 10pm, unaware that the safety valve had not been replaced, a technician pressed a start button for the liquid gas pumps - and the gas began to leak out of it. Piper Alpha was now primed, like a bomb, to blow. No one was aware of it, but for each man on board, a clock had begun to tick.

Within two hours, the mere length of a Hollywood movie, the platform would become a blackened skeleton, and its accommodation blocks sunken coffins on the ocean bed. The horror began as the 226 men on board were settling down for the evening. Ian Fowler, a joiner, was waiting for the racing results on the radio. Mark Reid, a lead foreman with a drilling company, had arrived on-board that morning and was taking a break in the tea shack. Bob Ballantyne, an electrician, had just come off the phone to his wife. Within seconds of the gas pumps being turned on, the first explosion happened, ignited probably by a tiny spark. It could have come from the electrics, from anywhere - no one knows. In the cinema, where many were watching the golf movie Caddyshack, light fittings fell from the ceiling and the screen collapsed. Workers recalled a flash of white light and a noise described as a banshee's wail. The radio room on top of the rig overlooking on one side the green of the helideck was partly destroyed.

Enlarge North Sea Piper Alpha oil rig off the coast of Aberdeen in Scotland after it caught fire, killing 167 people ten years ago On the other side of the room was the mechanical clutter of the pipedeck, but smoke and flame now obscured and rose above it. 'Mayday, mayday. . . explosion and fire on the oil rig on the platform and we'll (sic) abandoning abandoning the rig.' That garbled first message from the radio operator was broadcast on the emergency distress frequency at four-and-a-half minutes past ten. It was followed two minutes later by another, which conveyed the state of panic: 'Mayday Mayday . . . we require any assistance available. Any assistance available. We've had an explosion and, er, a very bad explosion and fire. Er, the radio room is badly damaged.' At 10.08pm: 'Mayday Mayday... we're abandoning the radio room, we're abandoning the radio room.

We can't talk any more, we're on fire.' As the disaster unfolded, most people gathered in the galley below where, within 30 minutes, the smoke was thick and men lay on the floor, clutching to their faces torn strips of towel that had been dunked in the galley's ornamental fish tanks. Among those in the galley was the man in charge of the oil rig, installation manager Colin Seaton. He struggled to exert authority and confidence in the face of growing fear. He was the man everyone was turning to for orders and guidance, but he was crumbling under the pressure. At first, he tried to tell everyone to calm down, that a Mayday had been sent, and that the whole world knew they were in trouble. As the smoke became denser and the clamour for information grew, Seaton climbed up on to a table in an attempt to exert his faltering command, but his words were drowned out by the din of his panicking crew. They were trapped, surrounded by flame and smoke.

All Seaton could do was to tell them to calm down, that as part of the emergency procedure, four men with breathing apparatus were at that very moment outside the galley trying to find a safe passage for everyone to escape. Using a hand-held radio, he attempted to reach the men for an update. Four times he tried, to be greeted only with silence. As one witness recalled: 'The flames were right along the north face and the east face of the galley, and they were actually breaking the windows, and the flames just started to come in the windows, and the door in the galley was on fire.' At 10.33pm, an unknown voice relayed on Channel 9 of the VHF radio what would be the final transmission from Piper Alpha: 'People majority in galley area. Tharos come. Gangway/hoses. Getting bad.' Tharos was a 30,000-ton multi-support vessel for the rig, providing hospital accommodation and technical back-up. Its crew needed no radio message to understand how bad things were - they could see the apocalypse developing before their eyes.

David Olley, the medic on Tharos, went up the boat's helideck where he expected to see a few wisps of smoke coming from the rig. What he saw convinced him no one could survive. Then he overheard the helicopter landing officer, a meticulous professional, swear over the VHF radio when describing the situation to a neighbouring platform. He said: ' "A" module is on fire, "B" module is on fire, "C" module is on fire. We have fire from water level to the helideck, in fact the whole f***ing thing is on fire.' On the oil platform a handful of men had managed to get off the rig, after climbing down a rope and jumping into the water. Others were trying to escape from the galley, but most of the staircases were choked with thick black smoke. Several workers were shielding themselves from the intense heat in a fabrication shop where tools and machinery were fixed. Here, joiner Ian Fowler and others, their cheeks pressed to the floor, kept themselves conscious by constant talking. Hope was quickly diminishing - along with the breathable air and, this far north, the last of the summer light. Creaking groans and collapsing walkways sounded all around them.

Instrument technician Roy Carey was struggling down some stairs with breathing apparatus to a point some 70ft above the water when a second, more terrible, explosion struck. A major pipeline filled with high-pressure gas ruptured. As more than 450 cubic tonnes of gas escaped, a fireball enveloped the platform and rose to a height of 700ft. Carey dived overboard through the wall of flame. 'I had hoped that the flame would pass, but then I was enveloped in it and I realised I was just being burned up. So I launched myself off. I hoped that I would not hit anything on my way down.' Conscious of the height from which he dropped, he tried to minimise his resistance to the water. 'I tried to make as clean a dive as I could. So I kept my hands very straight and as a result I went very, very deep.' So deep did Carey sink that he feared he would never reach the surface before the pressure on his lungs forced him to take a breath. When he did surface it was to an inferno that appeared to hover just a few feet above the surface of the sea, cooking the air underneath. It was like being under a grill.

He struggled and tried to keep his head underwater as his face began to burn. He thought he was going to die. 'It was a low time . . . I was being cooked alive.' Flames were igniting his hair and burning layers of skin off his face, and every time he tried to scream, it was like swallowing fire. Convinced death was imminent, Carey preferred to drown than roast. He deliberately sank six feet down where he could see the flaming orange above; then it turned to white and he thought of his eldest daughter's wedding dress and remembered his promise to give his youngest child the wedding of her dreams. He decided he could not die, swam to the surface, away from the platform and finally wedged himself into the side of a wrecked lifeboat. Back in the galley, many were still trapped and the situation was becoming more desperate by the minute. Rigger Jim McDonald, a large man with a bald head and mutton chop whiskers, thought to himself: 'Get yourself off', and then went to collect his friend and cabin-mate Francis McPake, who was reluctant to follow.

McDonald managed to cajole him as far as the reception area next to one of the platform's small shops, where the smoke drifted around the boxes of Marathon bars, packets of Fisherman's Friends and Murray Mints. McPake would go no further and instead slumped down on to the floor, where McDonald, left him with regret and remorse. He then found his way to the stairway and began to crawl down level after level. The smoke was so thick he could hardly breathe, so he put his jumper over his head to strain the smoke through the wool. And then there were the bodies. Some men had passed out after 15 to 20 minutes of breathing in smoke, and parts of the staircase were blanketed with their bodies. McDonald, in deep distress, was forced to crawl over them. Some had decided to go up, rather than down, and the helidecks had become home to a huddled community of the trapped, waiting for salvation to come from the sky. There were small groups dotted across the two helidecks as well as the roofs of the accommodation wing and the damaged radio room.

One man was scaling the drilling derrick in the hope of rising above the smoke and somehow being winched off by a helicopter. The din of the escaping gas, roaring all around, and the sharp crackle of fire was deafening. At times, they were entirely ringed in smoke, but sometimes the high winds would clear their view and they could see the Tharos, just a few hundred metres away, a distance that might as well have been miles for all the assistance the vessel could offer. On the roof of the radio room a group of men, convinced the end was near, began to talk of how much they loved their wives, the fear of never seeing their children grow up. They began asking where, in their darkest hour, was God? Scaffolder Joe Meanen stood and listened. He had no wife, no children, but was determined to have the option of them and somehow survive the night. He walked across the roof and on to the helideck where no helicopter could possibly land because of the heat and smoke. He was looking down towards the Tharos - which was now dousing the helidecks with its water cannon - when another gas pipe, weakened by the intense heat, gave out.

This flooded the fire with enough gas to power millions of homes, enveloping the helideck with sheer walls of fire that rose 500 feet above their heads, curving over to form a basilica of flame. Men on the immediate edge of the helideck were engulfed instantly by the flames, while those nearer the middle had time to turn and run. Impulsively, Meanen ran across the helideck and jumped down into the water 170ft below. It was only when his back foot took off that he thought: 'What the f*** have I done?' He fell for six seconds, and as he fell, he burned. But he lived. Mark Reid, the drilling foreman, also threw himself from the helideck into the water 170ft below. His body reached terminal velocity, at 120 miles per hour, and he could easily have been killed by the force of hitting the water. Somehow, he survived and drifted out into the night. In the water, the electrician Bob Ballantyne, who had jumped from the 70ft level, had no time to regret the friends he had seen devoured by the fireball.

He was under the rig, still fighting for his life, with chunks of steel dropping down around him every few seconds, and the sea in front of him was coated in oil or already alight. He watched as a giant crane, hundreds of tons of iron and steel, collapsed into the water, sending salt water spray into his face. Ballantyne faced an agonising choice: to stay under and die as the rig collapsed, or to swim out in oil-coated water which could swallow him in flames at any moment. He made his decision and kicked out from the platform between islands of floating fire. He was conscious of three reasons for living: his wife, the three-week holiday in France they had booked, and the faint, glorious prospect of Clyde Football Club lifting the European Cup. Rescue vessels were by now picking up survivors. By the light of an Aldis lamp, crew on the Silver Pit, a converted trawler which acted as a 24-hour stand-by vessel for the rig in case of emergency, could see a shattered lifeboat from the platform in the water. On this broken, twisted hunk of wood, Roy Carey painfully lifted his head, burned down to the bone, and wondered if his prayers had been answered.

The Silver Pit sent its fast rescue craft and Carey was picked up just before 11pm. Another rescue craft heard a cry in the night and ventured towards the rig until the crew's faces were burning. In the oily blackness which glowed from the fire, they finally saw two white points appear on the surface. Mark Reid, one of the men who had jumped from 170ft, had opened his eyes. Around 11.15pm, the message came through to Tharos to move back from Piper Alpha for fear of an underwater explosion. Tharos requested that all survivors be brought to her. Around 11.20pm the last and biggest explosion of the night, as the third of the three main gas pipes blew up, signalled the end for anybody left in the accommodation modules and for almost all the hundred or more workers who still waited in the galley in the futile hope of rescue. As modules crashed down and decks collapsed, the seabed became a junkyard of debris. Anybody who now survived did so by a miracle.

The fabrication shed where Ian Fowler had prepared himself for death, collapsed in such a way as to give him access to the ruins of the derrick which he used as a climbing frame, burning his hands and melting the soles of his shoes as he managed to find a stage from which to jump into the fiery sea. The Silver Pit's fast rescue craft, battered and blackened with smoke was by now dodging debris and dead bodies to pick up desperate men. It was losing power and taking on water, but as it turned back to the Silver Pit, the crew spotted a hand waving. It was 100ft under the collapsing platform, and rescue was a daunting task for any craft, let alone one beginning to sink, but the crew went for it. There could be just one pass, and they gunned the engine. The heat intensified and the boat rocked as it dodged debris, but three sets of arms stretched out and snatched the man up as they passed. The survivor was grey and coughing with smoke residue, but he was alive, one of around 30 men that the craft rescued. Electrician Bob Ballantyne had drifted far from the platform.

His face and hair were black with oil when he saw a Norwegian boat and waved with the last of his strength. He was hauled aboard and treated for his burning face with a packet of frozen peas. Some hours later Ballantyne was taken to a helicopter. He looked down on the wreckage - his workplace, his quarters, the friends he had known. Then he rested his head against the window and began to sob. Adapted from FIRE IN THE NIGHT: THE PIPER ALPHA DISASTER by Stephen McGinty, published by Macmillan this week at £17.99. Stephen McGinty 2008. To order a copy at £16.20 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

Question: I In which year was the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster?
Answer: 1988